Does making Election Day
a Public Holiday have an
impact on Voter Turnout?

In many democracies around the globe, Election Day is either on weekends or is declared a Federal Holiday. Does this have an impact on voter turnout? 🗳🤨

Americans have been going to the polls on a Tuesday in November since 1845. But why Tuesday of all days? And why November? Turns out that when the first law designating Election Day was being created, America was largely an agrarian society. According to Pew Research Center, “…November made sense because it was after farmers were done with their harvest, but before hard winter weather that could make it difficult for them to get to town to vote. And since traveling by horse over unimproved roads could take a while, lawmakers wanted to avoid making their constituents travel to or from the polls on a Sunday (widely considered a day of rest and worship, not politicking).”

But today, Tuesday is an inconvenient day to vote for some Americans. Especially those who cannot take time off work. There are many reasons that deter people from hitting the polls, for example general disillusionment or restrictive identification requirements. But when practical reasons like taking time off work get in the way of a functioning democracy, it is worth exploring who is disproportionately affected by the problem and how other countries are dealing with it.

I started by scraping this Wikipedia page to get a basic understanding of how things differ around the globe. I then used that information to come up with some categories to divide nations into. Data shows that in 2022, other countries have adapted to either holding their elections on a Weekend or declaring a National Holiday.

Here’s a map that visualizes global election day trends. You can hover some countries to learn more about when they hit the polls.

When do countries around the world vote?

What about Voter Turnout?

Let's move on to Voter Turnout. I want to start small with the United States. 50 states is a small enough dataset for us to see trends! As we can see above, Election Day is not a public holiday in the country but same states give workers a paid leave. 13 to be precise. Let's see which states these are and if they have a higher voter turnout. The data for these maps is from US Elections Project.

Our ultimate goal was to test if this trend is seen worldwide. But I failed to make Altair work properly, here's a rough sketch of what could have been.